The Erroneous Belief that Life Should be On-course

One of our employees has been working here pregnant, courageous and remarkably good-humored even in being a bit overdue. Yesterday she gave birth.

I haven’t been around anyone for many years through her whole pregnancy. And so having a baby seems like an unusual, radical decision to me these days. Maybe it is; maybe it always has been. But then I thought about it, noticed my feelings, realized that, between the news media’s emphasis on disasters and my own common depressive inclinations, it can lead me to believe that this is a world one might hesitate bringing new life into. What a brain-washing that has been!

This world may be challenging but one enormous thing that the media and even our everyday activities often do not emphasize is how beautiful this miraculous planet is. To bring new life onto earth is a blessing and an act of faith and courage for one and all. With the bringing forth of each new innocent awareness we reproduce and continue hope. The hope that each, first, can live a fulfilling life and, second, can contribute to a world where the life and the beauty that surround us and lives within us can be even more truly honored and actualized.

I am attached to the erroneous belief that life should be on-course. It is helping me to remember the trajectory of airplanes. They are always off course, either to the right, left, down or up from where they’re trying to go. But these varyings average out to the right direction! So it is for humankind and so it is for each one of us. We are mostly at least a little off course nearly all the time, veering from one existential imbalance to another, however in such a way that we generally grow in helpful directions. It’s just like how we walk – leaning from one side then to the other – yet somehow going forward.

May this new life help us see this truth and work toward a world where its beauties are more and more recognized, celebrated and honored deep inside us and through our actions. Maybe our wanderings add necessary variations, ornamentations, fostering beauty on and a kind of dance to the paths we take in life.